When we interact with animals, we intuitively read thoughts and feelings into their expressions and actions - it is easy to suppose that they have minds like ours.
New Essays on Singular Thought presents ten new, specially written essays on an issue central to philosophy of mind, language, and perception: the nature of our thought about the external world.
Tyler Burge presents a substantial, original study of what it is for individuals to represent the physical world with the most primitive sort of objectivity.
According to an ancient and still popular view -- sometimes known as 'eudaimonism' -- a person's well-being, or quality of life, is ultimately determined by his or her level of happiness.
While much has been written on Descartes' theory of mind and ideas, no systematic study of his theory of sensory representation and misrepresentation is currently available in the literature.
Narratives are artefacts of a special kind: they are intentionally crafted devices which fulfil their story-telling function by manifesting the intentions of their makers.
Sounds and Perception is a collection of original essays on auditory perception and the nature of sounds - an emerging area of interest in the philosophy of mind and perception, and in the metaphysics of sensible qualities.
The ten essays in this collection were written to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the lectures which became Wilfrid Sellars's Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, one of the crowning achievements of 20th-century analytic philosophy.
Spheres of Reason comprises nine original essays on the philosophy of normativity, written by a combination of internationally renowned and up-and-coming philosophers working at the forefront of the topic.
Consequentialism, the theory that morality requires us to promote the best overall outcome, is the default alternative in contemporary moral philosophy, and is highly influential in public discourses beyond academic philosophy.
Personalised accounts of out-of-body (OBE) and near-death (NDE) experiences are frequently interpreted as offering evidence for immortality and an afterlife.
Wilfrid Sellars was and remains one of the most prominent and important twentieth-century philosophers: his writings played a key role in shaping the philosophical agenda in the English-speaking world during the second half of the 20th century, and they remain an active focus of intense critical attention and lively discussion.
Stephen Mulhall presents a detailed critical commentary on sections 243-315 of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations: the famous remarks on 'private language'.
Jerry Fodor presents a new development of his famous Language of Thought hypothesis, which has since the 1970s been at the centre of interdisciplinary debate about how the mind works.
On the traditional Cartesian picture, knowledge of one's own internal world -- of one's current thoughts and feelings -- is the unproblematic foundation for all knowledge.
Throughout his philosophical career at Michigan, UCLA, Yale, and Oxford, Robert Merrihew Adams's wide-ranging contributions have deeply shaped the structure of debates in metaphysics, philosophy of religion, history of philosophy, and ethics.
Internalism in philosophy of mind is the thesis that all conditions that constitute a person's current thoughts and sensations, with their characteristic contents, are internal to that person's skin and contemporaneous.
Content and Justification presents a series of essays by Paul Boghossian on the theory of content and on its relation to the phenomenon of a priori knowledge.
Thoughts is a collection of twelve essays by Stephen Yablo which together constitute a modern-day examination of Cartesian themes in the metaphysics of mind.
The voluminous writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein contain some of the most profound reflections of recent times on the nature of the human subject and self-understanding - the human condition, philosophically speaking.
Descartes's philosophy has had a considerable influence on the modern conception of the mind, but many think that this influence has been largely negative.
In Embodied Minds in Action, Robert Hanna and Michelle Maiese work out a unified treatment of three fundamental philosophical problems: the mind-body problem, the problem of mental causation, and the problem of action.
John Cottingham explores central areas of Descartes's rich and wide-ranging philosophical system, including his accounts of thought and language, of freedom and action, of our relationship to the animal domain, and of human morality and the conduct of life.
There are few more unsettling philosophical questions than this: What happens in attempts to reduce some properties to some other more fundamental properties?
